WTF? If you’re a staff member and the username you want is already taken, suck it up and deal with it like the rest of us have to. If I were to contact support and say ‘hey, you know what, Kate isn’t being used, can I have it please?’ I very much doubt I would get any joy. Not even if I could provide documentary evidence that my name was Kate. (Which it isn’t, it’s just a random name. I could just as easily have gone for Emily or Rebecca.)

And you know why you have that policy? Other than it being too much trouble to faff around with the database? And other than the fact that they might be using the username for the API key or to read their friend’s private blog? Because of the risk that the original owner might be a raving drama queen who promptly accuses the new holder of the username of trying to steal their identity. That is why. I think it very unlikely that Nikolay really is hacking into his namesake’s Twitter account; but if you’ve already illustrated that your company can’t be trusted, he hasn’t got much reason to believe your denials.

(Also, did the controversy over Scoble’s Specialness not clue you into the fact that people really don’t appreciate it when staff and their friends don’t have to abide by the same restrictions as the proles? Why do I have to keep spelling this stuff out?)

Related

Alansaid

As much as I think this Nikolay guy is going about his complaints in the wrong way, I do empathise, and think it was a pretty underhanded act by Automattic. Other services wouldn’t pull a fast one like this, at least not without asking the current owner of the account, I don’t see why WP should be any different just because the site isn’t being used.

I secured the account alan.wordpress.com almost two years ago, used it for a week at the height of my TISM-mania and haven’t touched it since. Every few months or so I get someone trying to get the password via the ‘retrieve password’ form, so I know it’s wanted by someone, but as much as I don’t care for WP.com, I’d be very disappointed (pissed off, even) if Automattic gave it to someone else just because it wasn’t being used. I don’t use roughly 90% of the accounts I have on the internet, but if I ever want to use them, I like to know they’re there. Forums doing house-cleaning on old accounts that clutter up the database is about the only compromise I’m willing to accept here.

Chrissaid

“If you’re a staff member and the username you want is already taken, suck it up and deal with it like the rest of us have to. If I were to contact support and say ‘hey, you know what, Kate isn’t being used, can I have it please?’ I very much doubt I would get any joy.”

There’s someone who signed up for an account on LiveJournal using his last name, as I do. Only thing is, I’m very active online with most of my accounts using the same name, and the other person hasn’t logged into LJ with that account since 2004-01-13, hasn’t made any posts since creating the account or modified his profile… nothing.

Chances of me getting them to prune the name so I can take it? None. Nada. Asked them, knowing the answer would be no, which it was, I moved on.

I know that AOL still holds my 3 older, outdated AIM screennames for me to grab back any time I wanted, as does Yahoo.

Automattic needs to grow a pair and fess up, and Matt needs to know when to stop calling the kettle black. (Wait, that expression was popular before his time, he might not recognize it.)

Once you start describing calls from dissatisfied consumers as *harrassment* you are in deep trouble. But with the amount of *unplanned maintenance* outages they need to keep their distance from the hoi polloi with their endless whining about their blogs not being accessible. :)

Mark did get his username from somebody else, but he contacted the guy, asked whether he would be willing to let him have it and then publically thanked him for giving it to him. It probably wasn’t the wisest thing to do because it did apparently set a precedent for staff commandeering usernames that had already been taken, but you can’t really fault the way he went about it.

Livejournal gets a lot of people demanding dormant usernames because, with 13 million accounts, their namespace is unbelievably crowded. They do recycle deleted names now for this very reason (and they make a bit of pocket money by charging people to rename their existing journals), but everyone knows that handing over somebody else’s account because they don’t post in it right now is something you don’t do. Apart from the endless drama potential, it’s just not right. Mark has argued elsewhere that a decent username is the reward you get for being 1337 enough to bag an account when they were invite-only, and the first-come first-served principle should really apply to everyone equally.

It’s very lucky for Automattic that this guy isn’t being calm and reasonable. Suspiciously lucky, in fact. You have to wonder whether they deliberately wound him up in order to make him go sufficiently ballistic to lose all credibility.

@Wank: There are now grounds for the suspension of your account, too! :-)

Guys, there’s nothing personal in my desperate attempts to make the web a bit more fair. If it was something planned, I would probably do a lot better in wording and stuff, but it was all natural and spontaneous. I don’t care about publicity as Matt suggest, I really think this is unfair based on the thousand of services I have experience with and you, having blogs here at WordPress.com, are the ones that have a lot more to lose than I do. Basically the ToS states that you can get suspended at any time without any explanation given. It seems that contacting customer service leads to suspension, so, at least there’s some lesson learned after all.

If Livejournal considered abuse of staff members as grounds for suspension they would only have 12 million users ;)

Seriously, though, if you’re providing a service your users are not going to be nice to you 100% of the time, especially when you have failed them in some way. If you’re a professional you accept the reality of that, you realise that treating people badly makes them treat you badly in return, and you don’t exclude people from your service just because they happen to be annoying you.

Hmmm, I wonder if I got dropped into another Akismet block. Free Speech my a*cough*s. Thanks for checking.

Short version: The FAQ on recycling name got rewritten within the last 24 hours. I linked to it in a comment in that techcrunch and afterwards, the bit about how recycling name had been added it afterwards.

Unless of course your choice happens to be the same as an Automattic employee’s, in which case all bets are off. I love how they say ‘historically’ they’ve never hijacked an active username and don’t rule out doing so in the future. Basically, any man who managed to sign up early enough to bag his first name needs to be worried, doesn’t he? And of course we don’t have any guarantee that this abuse of privilege is going to be limited to wordpress.com staff only, and never extended to that guy who runs the cool site they just added a widget for, or VIPs, or assorted other Friends of Matt.

I note that Alex King has recently added a second post to alex, but will this be enough to keep the precious username in his hands and away from Alex Shiels? Will Matt favour the erstwhile developer over the current employee? Truly, we live in exciting times.

@drmike: I can’t believe what Matt has done in front of us all.Changing the FAQ overnight is so arrogant! If Matt was a man enough, we would say “sorry!”, admit he (or at least Nikolay Bachiyski) made a mistake and say “we’ve changed our policy”. No, they chose to cover up and make people think drmike and I cannot read. Things are getting worse, not better. I still cannot believe this is happening!

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